A young Ukrainian graphic designer, who had to flee her city of Kharviv, publishes on Instagram photos of ruins, in which she integrates drawn characters, to tell their old life “stolen” by the Russian occupier.
“The idea was to show what our lives were like. The lives that were stolen from us”. Sasha Anisimova is 30 years old, she is a graphic designer. Until February 24, she led a “very happy” life in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
A refugee in Cherkassy, south-east of kyiv, since the Russian invasion, she publishes on her Instagram account, images mixing the present and the life before. Photos of buildings in ruins or deserted streets, populated by small characters drawn in white pencil. His first illustration, published on March 14, is of a building with a destroyed facade. Sasha Anisimova drew in each apartment of the vacant inhabitants to their occupations. One smokes at his window, another does yoga, a third works on his computer.
“When I saw this horrible photo of the building without a facade, I imagined how people lived there. And what they lost. The idea was to show what our lives were like. The lives we were given stolen”, she explains to us, joined by Skype.
“I will never understand war and I will never forget that terrible morning. Nor will I ever understand how it is possible to lie so loudly and how it is possible not to believe so quietly,” she wrote in the caption. one of his illustrations on Instagram, alluding to the disinformation that Russia is carrying out to justify the invasion of its neighbor.
Like many Ukrainians, Sasha Anisimova had to flee her city hastily, taking only the bare minimum. “We were woken up by the sound of bombs, this morning of February 24. It was five o’clock in the morning. We grabbed some clothes, took the dog, and we left. We left our house and our city”.
For her grandmother, elderly and not very mobile, it was more complicated, but an uncle and aunt finally managed to exfiltrate her from Kharkiv. “Now my whole family is safe.”
“They are the heroes”
“My friends still live in Kharkiv,” she adds. She exchanges news with them every day. One of them, Kirill, photographer, sends her the shots that she reworks. “People of Kharkiv are very strong and brave. They help each other a lot.” From where she is, Sasha Anisimova tries to help her friends who have stayed there, to deliver medicines. Despite the interest aroused by her work – her first drawing has been “liked” more than 20,000 times the press is interested in her illustrations – the young woman finds it difficult to rejoice in this publicity. “I’m not very happy with the success of my drawings, because it stems from a horrible situation.” It is also difficult to escape guilt.
“Many doctors work under the bombs in Kharkiv. I rent an apartment, I am almost safe and I just draw. Many have volunteered to help. In Kharkiv, for example, people are cleaning the streets. The city is bombed, there is rubble everywhere, but our streets are clean! Because every morning, volunteers clean everything. They are the heroes. Not me”.
“I was living a very happy life”
On March 18, Sasha turned 30. In the caption of a photo with buildings dented by the bombardments, where she had represented herself at a table at a cafe terrace with her dog, she wrote this:
“I thought I really wanted a car, a house, trips, luxurious things and a huge list of other things, she writes again, but now I want to take my dog out for a quiet walk in my well-being Kharkiv. loved one, drinking coffee and not reading war news.”
“I lived a very happy life, because Kharkiv is a very nice city. A beautiful city,” she tells us again.
Sasha Anisimova has since published two new drawings. One adds travelers to the subway, which has become a bomb shelter and home for locals. The most recent depicts her walking her dog in front of a building riddled with bullets.
“This is the road where my dog and I used to go to visit my sister,” she says on Instagram. “A little further down the street is her house. There is a small apartment that houses my sister, her husband, my favorite nephew, my dog, a cat and a huge aquarium (…) I love my sister more than anything and I would love to go back to her place to drink wine and watch stupid shows.”
To help her country and her compatriots, Sasha Anisimova markets t-shirts illustrated with her first drawing, and this sentence “Ukraine is not alone”, Ukraine is not alone “And a date, February 24, 2022.
